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From Stele to Silicon: Publication of Statutes, Public Access to the Law, and the Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act Frederick W College of William & Mary Law School William & Mary Law School Scholarship Repository Library Staff ubP lications The oW lf Law Library 2019 From Stele to Silicon: Publication of Statutes, Public Access to the Law, and the Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act Frederick W. Dingledy William & Mary Law School, [email protected] Repository Citation Dingledy, Frederick W., "From Stele to Silicon: Publication of Statutes, Public Access to the Law, and the Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act" (2019). Library Staff Publications. 133. https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/libpubs/133 Copyright c 2019 by the authors. This article is brought to you by the William & Mary Law School Scholarship Repository. https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/libpubs LAW LIBRARY JOURNAL Vol. 111:2 [2019-9] From Stele to Silicon: Publication of Statutes, Public Access to the Law, and the Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act* Frederick W. Dingledy** For a legal system to succeed, its laws must be available to the public it governs. This article looks at the methods used by different governments throughout history to pub- licize legislation and the rulers’ possible motivations for publication. It concludes by discussing how the Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act provides the next logical step in this long tradition of publicizing the law. Introduction .........................................................165 Mesopotamia and Babylonia ...........................................167 Dynastic China .......................................................168 Ancient Greece .......................................................170 Rome . .................................................................172 The Monarchy .....................................................172 The Republic ......................................................173 The Empire ........................................................174 The Byzantine Empire and Justinian’s Corpus Juris Civilis ................177 England .............................................................179 Virginia .............................................................183 Modern Foreign and International Views ................................188 The U.S. Federal Government ..........................................189 The Internet, Public Access to the Law, and UELMA ......................192 UELMA ..........................................................192 Delaware ..........................................................193 Conclusion ..........................................................194 Introduction The laws of a country are necessarily connected with every thing belonging to the people of it; so that a thorough knowledge of them, and of their progress, would inform us of every thing that was most useful to be known about them.1 * © Frederick W. Dingledy, 2019. ** Senior Reference Librarian, William & Mary Law School. The author would like to thank Benjamin J. Keele and Sunil Rao for their invaluable help. 1. 1 William Waller Hening, The Statutes at Large: Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia i (photo. reprt. 1969) (1823), quoting 1 Joseph Priestley, Lectures on History, and General Policy 155 (1793), https://archive.org/details/lecturesonhis00prie. 165 166 LAW LIBRARY JOURNAL Vol. 111:2 [2019-9] ¶1 Roman Emperor Gaius Caesar, nicknamed Caligula, was never known for his good behavior. For one, he exhausted his entire inheritance of 27 million gold pieces in under a year.2 To replenish his treasury, Caligula imposed taxes on almost any conceivable good or service. Originally, many subjects did not pay the new taxes because information on them passed only by word of mouth. In response, Caligula posted a copy of the new laws in public—in a location so high and in print so tiny that no one could read them.3 ¶2 As Judge Jeffrey Sutton aptly noted about Caligula’s actions, deliberately hid- ing the letter of the law from a country’s people is “not a good idea. How can citizens comply with what they can’t see?”4 ¶3 Legal philosopher Lon L. Fuller argues that a legal system can go awry in at least eight ways. Two are a failure to publicize the rules its subjects are expected to follow and a failure to make those rules understandable.5 Even if not many people actually read the published laws, Fuller says, publication is still important. People who read the law can help model the behavior of those who do not. Laws must be published so that they may be subject to public criticism. Publishing the law helps guard against ignorance by the officials sworn to uphold and enforce those laws. In addition, citizens are simply entitled to know the content of those laws, and the government cannot predict who will or will not read them.6 ¶4 The Internet era has made the act of publicizing the law easier in some aspects while adding new challenges. Electronic legal materials can be quickly dis- tributed to many more people than printed matter. Traditionally, however, it was easier to know whether print laws were authentic and how recently they were updated. The same does not hold true for online resources; it can sometimes be hard to tell when content on a website was last updated or whether it was altered from the official version. The Uniform Law Commission drafted the Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act (UELMA) in 2011 to address this issue, creating a set of guidelines intended to make authenticated legal materials easily and perma- nently available to the public.7 ¶5 This article focuses on legislation and royal and imperial edicts as it looks at how different governments have publicized their laws throughout the ages. It begins with ancient Babylonia and Mesopotamia, then examines dynastic China, ancient Greece, ancient Rome, England, and Virginia, followed by a look at the state of published federal law in the United States today. The final part discusses UELMA and how one state has implemented it, and concludes by discussing how historical precedent calls for states to pass UELMA to continue the tradition of publishing laws into the electronic age. 2. Gaius Suetonius Tranquillius, The Twelve Caesars ¶ IV.37 (Robert Graves trans., Penguin Books 1957). 3. Id. ¶¶ IV.40–IV.41. The line between state funds and emperors’ personal funds was blurry. Taxes that theoretically went to the state, such as the aurum coronarium that Caligula imposed, went directly to the emperor’s purse. Fergus Millar, The Fiscus in the First Two Centuries, 53 J. Roman Stud. 29, 38–39 (1963). 4. Summa Holdings, Inc. v. Comm’r, 848 F.3d 779, 781 (6th Cir. 2017). 5. Lon L. Fuller, The Morality of Law 38–39 (rev. ed. 1969). 6. Id. at 51. 7. Unif. Electronic Legal Material Act (UELMA) Prefatory Note (Unif. Law Comm’n 2011). Vol. 111:2 [2019-9] FROM STELE TO SILICON 167 Mesopotamia and Babylonia ¶6 Public relations, rather than public knowledge, may have inspired the earliest efforts at publicizing laws. Mesopotamian rulers Enmetena and Irikagina handed down edicts in the 25th to 24th centuries BCE that read more like a list of accom- plishments than a set of prescriptions for citizens.8 As the 22nd century BCE turned to the 21st, the founder of Mesopotamia’s Third Dynasty of Ur had his Laws of Ur- Namma—the oldest code of law known to exist—engraved prominently into tem- ple monuments throughout his kingdom.9 The Code of Hammurabi (King of Baby- lonia, r. ca. 1792–1750 BCE) was carved into a royal monument built with enough strength that it still survives today.10 ¶7 Hammurabi’s Code is closer to the modern idea of a codification,11 as it col- lects judicial decisions (in the form of “person who does X will be punished by Y”) and arranges them by subject.12 So far, though, little evidence suggests that Ham- murabi’s Code was cited in many trial documents or represented a complete state- ment of Babylonian law; anyone researching that era’s rules had to consult numer- ous other legal documents to get a full picture.13 While some scholars view these early codes as efforts to codify existing law for the ease of administering justice, others opine that they were more akin to propaganda14 or scholarly compilations similar to pharmacopoeia.15 ¶8 Hammurabi’s Code frequently featured in reading and writing lessons for centuries,16 but it may be a bit much to claim that the Code itself was a scholarly exercise. The idea that it served as a royal public relations exercise, on the other hand, makes sense. The main version of Hammurabi’s Code that survived to mod- ern times was inscribed on a monument called the Stele of Hammurabi.17 The Stele included an image of Hammurabi and Shamash, the Mesopotamian god of the sun and justice.18 A poetic prologue and epilogue describe Hammurabi’s great accom- plishments; how the gods chose him to deliver justice to Babylonia; how he inscribed these rules to protect the weak, orphans, and widows. Readers are then implored to remember Hammurabi’s name.19 The Stele further asks future kings to preserve the justice Hammurabi handed down.20 One inscription advises anyone 8. Claus Wilcke, Mesopotamia: Early Dynastic and Sargonic Periods, in 1 A History of Ancient Near Eastern Law 141–43 (Raymond Westbrook ed., Brill Handbook of Oriental Studies Vol. 72-1, 2003) (e.g., Enmetena “let the child return to the mother . established the liberation of barley debts. .”; Irikagina “cleared the prisons of indebted children of Lagaš. .”). 9. Bertrand Lafont & Raymond Westbrook, Mesopotamia: Neo-Sumerian Period (Ur III), in 1 A History of Ancient Near Eastern Law, supra note 8, at 183. 10. Kathryn E. Slanski, The Law of
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